France

Yohann Gozard

Biography

The work of Yohann Gozard explores the individual’s relationship to time, to the vacuity of deserted spaces with no identity, to the night's matt and deaf black.He pushes his own use of technical entrenchments, plastic and theoretical, questioning the co-existence of film and digital technologies in where they make sense. He takes the opposite view of the decisive moment’s question by an almost exclusive use of long breaks to offer a more contemplative approach of the man’s relationship to his perception of space and time. His work explores the conflicting interdependencies between the seen and perceived. He questions the limits of image in what it first speaks to our vision, to our desire to see and consume the spectacular, to be seduced by obvious and flattering pictures. He manipulates our palatability to perform some grotesque formal comparisons, to the benefit of contextual gaps and unusual smash-ups. Finally, he also questions the memory of places and his tracks.

Portfolio

Wonderpools

Lining roads off the cities, these large absurd shapes show countless poetic contradictions,
favoured by incongruous formal parallels. Out of scale and as vulgar as mysterious, these structures evoke
both the American dream and unlikely stele, the suburbs’ moai. Empty and shameless, these objects in
self-promotion vertically reveal the contradiction between the blue-baby varnish that upholster them in
hollow and the rough stratification which traces their facing’s topography.

Portfolio

Lumière noire (Black Light)

Starting from black and dithering deep in the night.Traveling countrysides sketched
by the weak scrolls of a lost electric light.And getting closer to the city on the sole clue of
an increasing luminosity.Up to the white.

Portfolio

about:blank

Started during a residence in Düsseldorf, Germany, my initial project was about exploring areas
of Garzweiler’s gigantic opencast mines.

I didn’t intend to shot photographs that
would be too much narrative or dramatic – something this kind of landscapes encourages, obviously – nor to
dive into some moralistic considerations even though the existence of these mines attests of a radical
choice: many villages are completely razed, highways and railroads are cut and a few months later, the whole
is replaced by a gaping and out of scale hole.I wanted to talk about these mines without showing
them, by suggesting the strangeness of areas that do exist but don’t appear on maps other than represented
by a white void. A place that changes so fast that the satellite images compiled by Google Earth are unable
to restore it properly, displaying an incoherent set of impossible connections and pictures switching from
blur to sharp.The series “about:blank” follow that, whose title calls to mind the name of white
pages “almost” empty on the Internet, and whose pictures are taken from nocturnal and overexposed
photographs.On the depicted landscapes, an intense lightening emanates from the ground, from the
gaping hole where the machines are working with powerful spotlights which cause the light.Thus
the white light on the photographs exactly tallies with what is white on maps.

Explore

Open Call for VISIO European Programme on Artists' Moving Images

Wytske van Keulen Residency

European Prospects artist, Michal Iwanowski film Go Home Polish will be showing at Iris Film Festival 2019